


The Three People You Meet in Limbo

by DancesWithCybermen



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s04e05 The Field Where I Died, Episode: s07e01 The Sixth Extinction, Episode: s08e15 DeadAlive, Love, Multi, Past Lives, Reincarnation, Romantic Soulmates, Soulmates, The Unremarkable House (X-Files)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-19
Packaged: 2020-01-20 16:30:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18528832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DancesWithCybermen/pseuds/DancesWithCybermen
Summary: While “dead” and buried for three months, Mulder finds himself in Limbo, where he receives insight into his life -- as well as the lives he and Scully have led throughout the centuries.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wtfmulder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wtfmulder/gifts).



> My Easter gift recipient didn’t give me a specific prompt, but looking at her history, she seemed to like reincarnation stories. I’d always wanted to do a fic exploring what happened to Mulder while he was “dead,” and this is the result.

There was no transition, no feeling of his soul leaving his body, no floating above his corporeal form. One moment, he was being torn apart on the alien ship, and the next, he was here. Where was here?

He shot up from a laying-down position. He was in a field. Was this the field he died in during the Civil War? No, this was a different field. The grass was long, the trees and flowers were in full bloom, and it was warm, like late spring or early summer. He sat up and saw that he was lying next to a farmhouse. He felt like he should recognize this place, but the memory was flickering, murky, like something he’d glimpsed in a dream.

He looked at himself; he was clothed, and he seemed whole. There were no marks on his hands. He felt his face and lifted up his shirt. No marks there, either, and no pain.

“Am I dead?” he asked aloud.

“That’s a good question.” The female voice had come from the direction of the house. Melissa Scully was sitting on the porch steps, looking like she did in life.

“Melissa.” He frowned. “You’re dead, so if I’m here, I’m dead, too.”

Melissa looked as though she were about to respond, and then she stopped and thought for a moment. “No. I mean, yes, they did bury you, but you’re not really dead.” 

That got Mulder’s attention. He jumped to his feet. “WHAT? What do you mean, they buried me? Who? What--”

Melissa shook her head. “It’s complicated. You and Dana certainly like the more interesting lives.”

“The more interesting what?” He approached the porch. Damn, that house looked familiar.

“Look, I’m not entirely sure why you’re here. You’re only supposed to be here if you’re dead, but if you were dead, you’d know where we are by now. The confusion from the transition is momentary. I’m not entirely sure why I’m here, either. I mean, I understand why I’d be one of the people who were part of your review, but your review isn’t … Well, it isn’t time for it yet.” 

Mulder gave her a blank look. He didn’t understand a thing Melissa had said; she may as well have been speaking a foreign language. “What is this place? Why am I here? Am I dreaming?”

“Now, those questions, I can answer. No, you’re not dreaming. We’re in Limbo. It doesn’t really look like this. It doesn’t look like anything. We make it look the way we want. You made this, uh, part of it look this way, not me, because this place was so important in one of the lives we shared together.” She gestured at the house and the fields surrounding it. “You really don’t remember it?”

“No. I mean, maybe.” Mulder shook his head in an attempt to clear it. “I feel like I should.”

“That’s because you had it built.” She held out her hand to him, and he followed her onto the porch. He took in the land around the house and started to get … flashbacks? They were like images from a dream, hazy, with no continuity, just a mishmash of brief images and feelings. He remembered clothes drying on a line outside, the smell of fresh hay, horses grazing, chickens scattering as people pulled up to the house in horses and buggies to see his wife.

Wait a minute.

Melissa smiled. “Is some of it coming back?”

Mulder leaned on the railing. “She was a doctor. Her practice was here.” He turned around, entered the home, and headed straight for a first-floor bedroom. It was set up like an early 20th century doctor’s examination room. There were vintage medical posters on the walls, along with a framed diploma. The text was in Latin, but he knew what it was; the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania had awarded an M.D. to Elizabeth Blair in 1897.

He traced the name with his fingertips.

*********************************************

Jonathan Green heard the barking dog before the furious pounding on the door. He groaned as he was jolted out of his sleep; it was pitch black and freezing cold. 

The woman beside him sighed, sat up, and reached for the robe she kept handy beside the bed. “Mrs. McCallin might be in labor,” she said.

“Wouldn’t your sister be handling that?” Beth’s sister, Kelly, was a local midwife. She’d delivered many of the children in their small rural community, including their own daughter.

“Yes, she would, unless something’s not right,” Beth said grimly, then grabbed a lamp and made her way out of the room.

Jonathan fumbled for the pocket watch he kept on the side table; it was after midnight. He found something to put on, and went down the stairs. Beth was right; it was Mr. McCallin and his brother, Joseph, and both men looked very upset. “She’s telling me everything’s fine, but she’s bleeding an awful lot, Doc, and Kelly said we should get you. I don’t remember her bleeding this much with the other two. Is she going to be okay, Doc?”

Beth did her best to calm the worried husband, then turned to Jonathan. “I need to go, now.” She headed for her office to get her medical bag and some clothes.

“Mommy?” Jonathan saw their own small daughter, Alice, descending the stairs, clutching her favorite dolly, the one she slept with. Jonathan smiled at her and scooped her up.

“Mommy needs to go help a sick lady,” he told her, giving Mr. McCallin and his brother what he hoped was a reassuring smile. He hadn’t liked the look on Beth’s face when she’d turned away from them. She was good at maintaining a stoic demeanor in front of family members, but her expression had shown him how she really felt. Something was profoundly wrong.

His wife emerged from her office carrying her coat and medical bag. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she told her husband before leaving with the two men.

She didn’t return until after breakfast. Jonathan didn’t have to ask how it had gone; her hollowed-out expression told the story. She put on a wide smile for Alice, who was thrilled to see her mommy, then sent the little girl outside to play. Only then did she collapse into her husband’s arms, sobbing.

It wasn’t the first time she’d lost a patient, not even the first time she’d lost a patient in childbirth, but she’d told him it never got any easier. In fact, she’d told him that the day she stopped crying for those she lost would be the day she’d stop practicing medicine.

*********************************************

The flashback had been a dream-like experience where he’d simultaneously been both observer and participant. Although she hadn’t physically appeared, he somehow knew that Melissa had experienced it with him.

“That was you who called for her,” Mulder said. “You were Kelly. You were her sister.”

Melissa nodded. “In that life, like my last one, but not always.”

“And Alice was Emily.”

“That’s right.”

Mulder closed his eyes and concentrated. “You died young in that life. The flu, the one that killed all those people.” He looked around the room. “I still don’t understand. Do we choose these lives? If we do, why would you choose lives that end so early? Why would Emily choose to die so early in her last life?”

“Well, they all have to end sometime,” Melissa said. “For me, I get kind of bored when I’m in one life, one time, for too long. Life on Earth is supposed to be about experiencing and growing.” She saw the look of confusion on his face. “This is really weird. I shouldn’t have to explain any of this to you, but I guess I need to, or you’re going to get more confused. Let’s go back outside. This house always made me claustrophobic. I don’t know how you lived here.”

*********************************************

On the porch, Melissa instructed Mulder in Reincarnation 101. He, Scully, and Melissa were part of a group who had led many lives, together and separately, over thousands of years. Melissa was waiting in Limbo for her next Journey, which was going to be soon, she said, since she was partial to brief lives.

“They agreed with me that I’m not quite ready. I’m still processing my last life.”

“Who are They?”

Melissa shrugged. “They’re just … Them. We never see Them. It’s more a feel and perception thing, like the way I can perceive what’s happening on Earth right now. We just see each other, during Review and while we’re waiting to Journey again.”

Mulder frowned. “I don’t know if I like that. In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve had bad luck with unseen Them’s.”

“No, it’s not like that. They’re our guides, souls who are done Journeying. That’s why we can’t see them. They’re not here, in Limbo. They’re in the Next Place. We can’t go there until it’s time.”

Mulder put his head in his hands. “I don’t like any of this. I still think this is a dream, or I’m just dead, and it’s like a Twilight Zone episode where I don’t want to admit it yet.”

Melissa laughed. “You know, I had a bit part on that show in the life I had before I was Dana’s sister. I met Rod. Great guy! You and Dana weren’t in that life, but you’re always in each other’s lives, and you’re always lovers, never siblings, never neighbors, never friends, never anything else, in any incarnation. Do you know how rare that is? You always go back together, and you always choose to be in love with each other. You’re pure soulmates.”

“HA!” Mulder wagged his finger at her. “That can’t be right, because I Sarah Kavanaugh was my fiancee during the Civil War. Scully was my sergeant. Then, Scully was my father in Nazi Germany. I did a past-life regression and saw all of it.”

“Are you sure about that?” Melissa cocked her head. “I remember when that happened. I watch you and Dana all the time; we all do. You’re fascinating! Didn’t you think that Carl was in that life, too?” Seeing Mulder’s blank look, she explained, “That’s his name, Carl, the one you call Cancer Man in this one. But you don’t know that yet. Anyway, he wasn’t a Nazi in Germany. He was on his current Journey by then. He was a young man in the United States? We can’t be in two lives at once; it doesn’t work that way.”

“Then why did I see it during my regression?”

“We’re supposed to forget our past lives while we’re Journeying. Our souls are thousands of years old, and human brains are finite. Trying to cram all those memories into a human brain would be like trying to pour a gallon of water into a coffee cup. If something goes wrong, and we do remember, the memories tend to be wrong, or at least incomplete. We mix up places, or times, or relationships.”

“Okay, riddle me this: Was I Sullivan Biddle?”

“Yes.”

“Then what happened during that life? I still can’t remember.”

“That’s not my story to tell.”

“Whose is it?”

“The next person you’re meeting here in Limbo.” Melissa closed her eyes. “And that’s going to happen -- about now.”


	2. Chapter 2

Just like that, Mulder found himself back in the field where Sullivan Biddle had died in battle, the same field where he and Scully had conducted their investigation into the Temple of the Seven Stars.

Melissa Ephesian was there - or was it Sarah Kavanaugh? She looked like Melissa Ephesian, although the woman standing before him had a warm, friendly smile and none of the hardened edges of the troubled individual he’d met several years before. She reached out to embrace him. He stiffened and kept his arms at his sides, but the response didn’t seem to bother her. “It’s good to see you again, but I’m not sure why we’re here right now.”

“Yeah, that seems to be par for the course around here,” Mulder grumbled. At one time, he’d wondered if this stranger was his soulmate, but his growing feelings for Scully and the intense relationship they had embarked on prior to his abduction had raised serious questions in his mind.

“Don’t worry,” Melissa told him. “I know we aren’t really soulmates.”

“You seem oddly okay with that.” Mulder remembered how upset she’d gotten during the past-life regression where she’d recalled her life as Sarah Kavanaugh and her love for Sullivan.

“Yeah, you really aren’t supposed to be here. Once we get here, it is all okay, because we understand the process and its purpose. I chose those troubled lives because I needed them to grow and understand. Lives of leisure are easy, but they aren’t conducive to growth and understanding. Of all souls, you and Dana know that. That’s why you choose the lives you do.” She began walking through the field, taking in the scenery, and gestured for him to follow her. “It really is beautiful here. It’s a shame I couldn’t appreciate it as Melissa. Sarah appreciated it. She had more joy in her life. My life.”

Mulder began having flashes of memory again, the way he did at the farmhouse with Melissa Scully. She was right; they were different than the ones he’d brought up during the past-life regression. These were more complete. Clearly, he’d had a relationship with Sarah Kavanaugh, but the images were accompanied by feelings of sadness, shame, and duty, not love.

Melissa gently put her hand on his arm. “You’re remembering what really happened in that life.”

***************************************

The first time it happened, Sullivan drank himself into a stupor. He was hoping he’d drank enough that he would never wake up again, especially since it was so cold outside. Drunks often froze to death if they fell asleep outdoors overnight. But dammit if his sister hadn’t gone to look for him, found him out in a dark corner of the barn, and then gotten fucking Matthew to help her carry him back to the house so he could sleep it off.

She had to go get fucking Matthew. She just had to. The last person on Earth he wanted to fucking see, the very person who’d been his downfall.

Sullivan knew that he was different from the time he was a boy, but what made him different didn’t become clear until his friends started looking at girls and he … Well, he knew better than to look at his friends, so he didn’t look at anything. He told his parents he was going to join the priesthood. He knew enough to know that it was the best place for men like him, but they were having none of it. He was their only son, and by god, he was going to marry and have children that would carry on the Biddle name.

So he had buried his face in his books. It was a good way to stay hidden, and he had an excuse. His father expected him to study law or medicine, “something solid.” He’d managed well enough until a new family had come to town and brought their son Matthew with them.

Sullivan couldn’t help but look at Matthew -- and to his horror, Matthew looked back.

It was wrong. It was wrong. It was wrong. But there was something about the short blond man with the bluest eyes he’d ever seen that compelled him, drew him in. So it finally happened, and then it happened again, and again. It kept happening until the day they died together in that field.

***************************************  
Mulder gasped. “What the FUCK?” He thought of himself as rather progressive when it came to gays and lesbians. He felt they should have the same rights as anyone else, and he didn’t care what other people did in the privacy of their homes, but he had never been attracted to men. Not even remotely. How the HELL had he been attracted to a man? And how the HELL was that man Scully? What did this mean about him? About her? About them?

Melissa laughed. “They’re just corporeal forms, Fox, just flesh and muscles attached to bone.” She gestured at herself. “This isn’t what I really look like, and you don’t really look like that. This is just what we understand on this level. That’s why we can’t see Them. We wouldn’t be able to comprehend it.”

“Them. Them. THEM. Fuck Them! Why did THEY make Scully a fucking MAN?” Mulder’s head was spinning. 

Melissa let him rant and rave and gesticulate as she calmly waited for him to settle down. He most definitely wasn’t dead. He wouldn’t be going on like this if he were. He would understand these sorts of things.

Finally, he tired out and collapsed in a heap on the ground. She sat down beside him. “Fox, They didn’t make either of you into anything. You and she chose those roles in that life. You could have chosen differently. You know, I was a man once.” She shuddered. “Definitely not doing that again. My god, the ego.”

That coaxed a laugh out of him. He looked up at her. “But Sullivan lied to you in that life. He was engaged to you, but he was carrying on an affair with his sergeant.” He blinked. “And you knew, or you suspected, anyway, especially when I followed him into the Army. My father could have gotten me out of military service, but I insisted it was my duty, which was bullshit. I remember now. It made you so sad that I couldn’t love you the way you wanted me to.”

“That’s right.”

“That doesn’t make you angry?”

“No, I chose that life, and it wasn’t all bad. After Sullivan died, Sarah carried on and met a nice man, someone who loved her back. You know him. He’s Walter Skinner in your current life.”

Mulder got up on his knees, threw his head back, and laughed hysterically. Sarah was married to fucking Skinner. Sullivan’s sister had been Melissa Scully, and Scully was a man, and Sullivan was gay and her (his?) lover. “Am I going to get a Review of everyone I’ve ever been? Because if I am, someone needs to give me a scorecard so I can keep track of all the players.”

“No, if this goes the way it does for someone who’s actually dead, you’ll get three. Don’t ask me why three; I don’t know,” she quickly added.

“So, this is, what, like, A Christmas Carol?”

“Funny you should mention that. Do you know that Dickens was inspired to write that after he had a dream where he remembered a Review?”

“Okay, but those ghosts delivered great insights to Scrooge. I don’t understand what I’m supposed to be learning here. What insight am I supposed to be getting from all of this, especially since I’m not supposed to remember any of it when I go back?”

“Well, being as you’re not really dead, I don’t know what you’re going to remember. None of us do. No one in our group has ever seen this happen before.”

Suddenly, Mulder heard thunderous pounding from above, and the field began shaking under their feet. The skies above the field were still clear. Melissa looked puzzled, but not alarmed. She closed her eyes in concentration. “What’s going on?” he asked her.

“They’re digging you back up.”

“HUH?”

“Walter figured out you’re not really dead, and you’re being exhumed.” Her eyes snapped open. “It won’t be long now, and They want to make sure your last Review happens before you go back.” She took his hands in hers. “I think I understand now.”

Well shit, it was good someone did.

“I hope I get to see you and Dana again on Earth. What you two have is nothing short of extraordinary, and I’m glad I got to be part of some of your Journeys.”


	3. Chapter 3

Now, he was on a beach. He recognized it as the same beach he’d visited back when an alien artifact sent him into a psychosis, then a coma, and his bastard birthfather and psychotic ex-girlfriend drilled holes into his skull. The boy was there again, the one he’d built a sandcastle with. He’d always wondered who that boy had been.

He knew now.

“You’re one of Them,” he said. The boy nodded. “But I thought we couldn’t see you.”

“You still can’t see me.” Mulder heard the boy’s voice, but he didn’t open his mouth. “This isn’t what I look like.”

“Why did I see you when I was in the coma? What did all of that mean?”

“You had a choice to make then. You could have stayed on Earth or gone back to the place you call Limbo to wait for your next Journey. You chose to stay on Earth, just as you’re choosing to stay there now.”

“Choose. I keep hearing all of you talk about choices, but even if we choose our lives before we live them, there are no choices after that. They’re predestined.” Mulder felt defeated. “If this was supposed to give me great insight, it hasn’t. What point is there in living all these lives if we have no control over what happens anyway?”

“You still don’t understand. There is always a choice. You choose your role, as a performer does, but how they play out is not scripted.” The boy closed his eyes and concentrated. Mulder saw his own funeral projected into his mind’s eye and blanched. He didn’t just see it; he felt the cold wind and smelled the dirt and heard Scully’s cries. Wait a minute; was she pregnant? “Because you chose to go to Oregon to look for the UFO, you were abducted, tortured, and left for dead. You could have chosen not to go and had a different outcome.” The vision in his mind’s eye dissolved and was replaced by another. He was in a park, playing catch with a small boy as Scully sat on a bench nearby.

“Yes, that is your boy.” The boy answered his question before he could ask.

“But how…? It doesn’t matter. I have to get back. You need to send me back. Melissa Ephesian said I wasn’t really dead, that I was being dug up.”

“We don’t send you anywhere. You always choose to go, both of you, always together. You could have become one of us thousands of years ago, but you don’t want to. You keep choosing to go back.”

Mulder’s mind’s eye was barraged with a series of sights, sounds, smells, tactile signals, even tastes. His bare feet sunk into the mud as he observed a new dawn on a young Earth, hundreds of thousands of years before. He lived in caves and crude shelters in ice and snow and deserts and steppes and jungles and swamps. The climate changed, animals and plants came and went. Humans discovered fire and made tools and built more elaborate habitats that eventually grew into villages and cities. He saw natural disasters and plagues and war and times of peace. The years, the centuries, the millennia went by. Lifespans became longer. Governments and empires rose and fell.

One thing was constant. She was always there, by his side. She looked different each time, but her soul was the same. They always found each other, always together, just as he’d been told, always seeking, always wanting to see more, do more, explore more, so long as they could do it together.

He understood now. He remembered, and for the first time since he’d woken up next to the farmhouse, for the first time since he’d been abducted from a field in Oregon, he felt at peace.

“These other souls,” he said to the boy, “like the two Melissas. They’re like infants next to us.” The boy just looked at him. “We were there at the very beginning, and we said we wanted to be there at the end.”

He heard medical equipment beeping, the sounds of a hospital, and he felt unsteady on his feet, like he was about to lose consciousness. “Why was I shown all of this? What was the purpose if I’m not going to remember?”

“Because you were at a juncture where you had a choice. You could have died on Earth, stayed here, and waited. Or you could have become one of us. But you don’t want to. You want to go back and keep seeking.”

He did. He wanted to go back, but he also wanted to remember. He felt himself fading and falling, falling, falling...

When he opened his eyes in the hospital, he knew he’d just had a very vivid dream. He knew it had been important somehow, but when he tried to focus and bring it to the surface, it just dissolved.

***************************************  
Farrs Corner, Virginia, 2005

They’d found the listing on Craigslist, a fixer-upper for sale by owner. They’d wanted something where they could pay cash, and this guy preferred cash. He’d inherited the house from some elderly relative and just wanted it gone. It needed too much work.

It was remote; they liked that, too. The authorities had lost interest in pursuing them, but they still wanted to lay low, especially Mulder, and this seemed like the perfect place for them to keep a low profile.

There was something else about it, too, something they couldn’t quite put their finger on. Neither of them had ever been to this house, had never even been to Farr’s Corner, but they both had a strange sense of deja vu.

Mulder looked for a clothesline outside. He didn’t understand why. For some reason, he just thought one was supposed to be there.

After they took possession, the first thing they needed to do was clean the place out. It hadn’t been tended to in years.

Mulder was sweeping what would become their bedroom when he heard Scully call to him from the attic. When he climbed the ladder, he saw her in a far corner, sitting next to a trunk that looked incredibly old, like it had been sitting there for decades. She was going through the contents and smiling.

Mulder sat beside her and gave her a quick kiss. He was pleased to see her smiling; they hadn’t had much reason to smile. “What’d you find?”

“I think this might have belonged to the original family who owned the house, Mulder. Look at this; it’s amazing.” She showed him an antique album with photos of a family dressed in early 20th century clothing. “Oh my god.” She pulled out what he at first thought was a framed photo but turned out to be a framed diploma.

It was from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and had been issued to Elizabeth Blair in 1897.


End file.
